Dominion today said it plans to close and decommission its Kewaunee Power Station in Carlton, Wis., after the company was unable to find a buyer for the 556-megawatt nuclear facility....Thomas F. Farrell II, Dominion chairman, president and CEO [said], "This decision was based purely on economics."

In some regions, the average selling price of a megawatt-hour today is less than $50 at times. But a survey of the industry by the Electric Utility Cost Group, an industry consortium, found that one quarter of nuclear plants with the highest costs were spending an average of $51.42 to produce a megawatt-hour from 2008 through 2010. And costs have gone up since then.

Yep, old pieces of crap from the 60s are expensive to maintain. Further, this is a single unit plant, that is even more expensicve in terms of manpower to operate.

Just as an examle: This power plant has the same amount of staffing, but produces five times as much electricity.

IMHO there is a great many other nuclear power plants in the US that will experience the same amount of pressure.

As the article says part of it is regional and part of it is bad timing. The plant is operating as a merchant plant in an area where there is a glut of power and the power purchase agreement with the utility is ending at the end of next year. All of the old, small, single unit plants will be subject to this pressure if they are not run by a regulated utility or don't have a long term power purchase agreement in place. The slow economy, cheap gas and overbuilding of subsidized wind are causing pricing pressures in the midwest.

Imaging using scattered cosmic ray muons may be able to show where the fuel is in the damaged Fukushima reactors. According to the article muon radiography has already been put to use after 9/11 to scan for nuclear materials in shipping containers and vehicles. I would say this counts as a novel use/benefit of high energy physics research.

The NY Times reports on an article to be published Friday in Science (I can't find the abstract or article yet), saying that many or most fish caught of the coast of Fukushima are still too hot to eat. Because biological exchange of Cs is fairly rapid, the article concludes that radioactive Cs is still present at high levels, probably on the sea floor. The Cs does not seem to be leaving the are rapidly. Unless one imagined the unthinkable possibility that TEPCO is lying about current releases.

Imaging using scattered cosmic ray muons may be able to show where the fuel is in the damaged Fukushima reactors. According to the article muon radiography has already been put to use after 9/11 to scan for nuclear materials in shipping containers and vehicles. I would say this counts as a novel use/benefit of high energy physics research.

Wow, fascinating stuff, especially since I just recently visited the LHC.I didn't know that the background Muon radiation level was that high and that one could use it for imaging techniques. Who said that high energy particle accelerator research would not yield any practical benefits?

Japanese not being ridiculous could show where the fuel is. The fact that TEPCO is still in charge of cleanup, is ridiculous to the extreme. Here, the capitalist version of Chernobyl: no government intervention, most of what we don't know is probably what TEPCO hides, took 2+ weeks for them to get a concrete pump to start refilling spent fuel pools, after all the ridiculous dumping of water off helicopters.

I think they are doing everything possible to avoid finding out. They measured the water level in the one reactors drywell and it was like 10m below what they expected. Note that after that happened, they never went and measured the level in the other two.....

Hurricane Sandy could also force the closing of some nuclear power plants. During Irene, at least two nuclear reactors, Oyster Creek in New Jersey and Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, were shut down. Reuters reports that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was monitoring the hurricane closely.

“We’re keeping a close eye on the coastal plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman, told Reuters. “All plants have procedures to deal with hurricanes, which include procedures to shut the reactors if winds are expected to reach a certain speed.”

As far as I can ascertain, the forecast track of Hurricane Sandy goes more or less directly over the Hope Creek NPP. Nothing to worry about, however. Hope Creek was built to the highest safety standards, following the General Electric Mark I containment design, which has been found to be foolproof in accidents involving water.

Should there be a storm surge in the Delaware Bay, the Salem NPP, which is a PWR design, can also be tested. It's also very safe. It was closed for two years for maintenance problems and is now subject to heightened oversight by the NRC.

Hurricane Sandy could also force the closing of some nuclear power plants. During Irene, at least two nuclear reactors, Oyster Creek in New Jersey and Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, were shut down. Reuters reports that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was monitoring the hurricane closely.

“We’re keeping a close eye on the coastal plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman, told Reuters. “All plants have procedures to deal with hurricanes, which include procedures to shut the reactors if winds are expected to reach a certain speed.”

We'll see.

Srrsly, NRC. You know better.

Those wind speeds are irrelevant by themselves to the power plant, so why focus on them? That's just a red herring. The real problems are four fold:

Multi-day loss of power grid

Storm surge flooding and excessive beyond design rain

No emergency diesel systems (and their fuel tanks) that are protected against external hazards

Loss of ultimate heat sink due to underwater sand and other crap blocking cooling water intakes

The NRC solution is to jury rig mobile pumps to the power plant and to hope that that will work. That's all there is to "The Proceedure".

Hurricane Sandy could also force the closing of some nuclear power plants. During Irene, at least two nuclear reactors, Oyster Creek in New Jersey and Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, were shut down. Reuters reports that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was monitoring the hurricane closely.

“We’re keeping a close eye on the coastal plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman, told Reuters. “All plants have procedures to deal with hurricanes, which include procedures to shut the reactors if winds are expected to reach a certain speed.”

We'll see.

Srrsly, NRC. You know better.

Those wind speeds are irrelevant by themselves to the power plant, so why focus on them? That's just a red herring. The real problems are four fold:

Multi-day loss of power grid

Storm surge flooding and excessive beyond design rain

No emergency diesel systems (and their fuel tanks) that are protected against external hazards

Loss of ultimate heat sink due to underwater sand and other crap blocking cooling water intakes

The NRC solution is to jury rig mobile pumps to the power plant and to hope that that will work. That's all there is to "The Proceedure".

What massively works in their favour is that people never learned a thing about the decay heat, and so the talk of the "shutting down" still sounds very reassuring. The public ignorance may be hurting prospects of nuclear energy, but the public ignorance is dramatically lowering the cost of running it. Take the spent fuel for example. If not for public ignorance, you could not just hoard multiple cores of spent fuel in the spent fuel pools, and don't even dream about the re-racking with boral or boraflex sheets! You could never have had the spent fuel pool on the top floor, you'd need to have a small cooling off pool and a big storage pool somewhere else. And of course you would never be able to save on the emergency cooling. You'd have to design 'passive' cooling right from the start, more passive than the best modern designs, too.

The reactor isn't the current area of concern (it's been shut down for refueling for about a week already). The concern is the spent fuel pool: at one more foot of flooding, they'll lose the ability to cool the pool normally. From there, they'll have a little over a day to set up alternate arrangements (the NY Times post mentions fire hoses).

As superstorm Sandy bore down on the East Coast, three nuclear power plants were shut down and an alert was issued for the Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey. This is an important reminder that the United States has several low-lying nuclear plants on the Eastern seaboard, with minimal protection against inundation. Particularly with climate change increasing the likelihood of extreme weather, this hidden threat to public safety should be remedied.

They claim that the storm surge from the 1938 hurricane would inundate a number of NPPs in the Northeast.

As superstorm Sandy bore down on the East Coast, three nuclear power plants were shut down and an alert was issued for the Oyster Creek plant in New Jersey. This is an important reminder that the United States has several low-lying nuclear plants on the Eastern seaboard, with minimal protection against inundation. Particularly with climate change increasing the likelihood of extreme weather, this hidden threat to public safety should be remedied.

They claim that the storm surge from the 1938 hurricane would inundate a number of NPPs in the Northeast.

Yep. I can't remember whether I said this before here at Ars; but in my opinion, US NPPs are practically unprotected against severe external hazards in thier design. The US safety philosophy was basically "we place our power plants in locations where there are no external hazards", hence there is no need for design considerations against external hazards. Now, this philosophy was mitigated by the interaction with other agencies (as well as the NRC) taking know natural hazards into account and altering the site in such a manner to provide for more defense. But, 60s knowledge and acceptability of risk was vastly different to now. Due to the way how licensing was conducted in the 60s, natural hazards were actually never again revisited after site licensing, and the NRC does not actually have a formal mandate for revisiting site selection criteria and their natural hazards. The NRC can easily create this mandate, it just needs formal adoption by its board of directors...

Unfortunately, nearly all countries in the world copied the US nuclear design codes during the 60s, including their complete lack of design factors for external hazards. They were simply oblivious of the planning bit for site selection! Hence, external hazards did not really factor into formal nuclear safety considerations around the world(*). I am only aware of two countries where this was not the case, and that was Germany and the UK.

(*)Note that the US is not significantly better, but at least they made an honest attempt using 60s methods and technology to rule out hazards based on site criteria.

Imaging using scattered cosmic ray muons may be able to show where the fuel is in the damaged Fukushima reactors. According to the article muon radiography has already been put to use after 9/11 to scan for nuclear materials in shipping containers and vehicles. I would say this counts as a novel use/benefit of high energy physics research.

Wow. That's the coolest thing ever. Is that what Enterprise is using when they scan a planet looking for something or someone?

TEPCO admits culpability due to a poor safety culture. Still waiting for them to drop the "lalala can't hear you" approach to proactively determining the state of the reactors.

I was reading that there's a startup that's been created to develop and market molten salt reactors (link). There's been long and interesting threads on these guys here in the past. They have drawbacks but would have been able to air cool in the event of an emergency shutdown. I think GE has a lead cooled fast neutron design that would be able to air cool as well.

I'm ambivalent on these new technologies. I don't object to them as such, but I'm having trouble believing they'll go anywhere in the time it takes the solar juggernaut to start crushing everything but natural gas.

I was reading that there's a startup that's been created to develop and market molten salt reactors (link).

A company with 3 people, no money, and the belief that they can build a prototype reactor in 5 years says all that there is to say about this. They appear to have no idea about how much they don't know.

I was reading that there's a startup that's been created to develop and market molten salt reactors (link).

A company with 3 people, no money, and the belief that they can build a prototype reactor in 5 years says all that there is to say about this. They appear to have no idea about how much they don't know.

I was reading that there's a startup that's been created to develop and market molten salt reactors (link).

A company with 3 people, no money, and the belief that they can build a prototype reactor in 5 years says all that there is to say about this. They appear to have no idea about how much they don't know.

To be honest, because of things like this as well as historical stuff like Minamata Disease, I've been gradually changing my view of Soviet Union vs the rest of the world. Sure, SU was corrupt and nutty, but that seems entirely on par with the west; and the personal rights during cold war do not seem to be far from where those are in any other country under comparable external threat. And the engineering, well, RBMK got it's pros and cons, the inverse shutdown is an issue outside all PRA, and the 'containment' is not of much use when you will have to vent anyway. Or the combustibility of graphite - a red herring, given the decay heat and given zirconium - uranium dioxide reaction. I think the largest mistake is to ignore the lessons on basis of "its some other country and we are much more awesome". That's how Fukushima happened, Japanese being terribly arrogant and ignoring Chernobyl (and ignoring TMI as well) on the level of regulation. The next big accident will likewise be some country where people think their government is massively less corrupt, and ignores Fukushima.

I agree with you that most of the characterizations of various countries are propaganda, spin, public relations, image building, however you want to label it. But distinctions need to be drawn when a country gets to slaughtering millions of its inhabitants or those of neighbors. And it doesn't matter whether the slaughter is humane, as in Indonesia, or brutal, as in Rwanda.

To be honest, because of things like this as well as historical stuff like Minamata Disease, I've been gradually changing my view of Soviet Union vs the rest of the world. Sure, SU was corrupt and nutty, but that seems entirely on par with the west; and the personal rights during cold war do not seem to be far from where those are in any other country under comparable external threat. And the engineering, well, RBMK got it's pros and cons, the inverse shutdown is an issue outside all PRA, and the 'containment' is not of much use when you will have to vent anyway. Or the combustibility of graphite - a red herring, given the decay heat and given zirconium - uranium dioxide reaction. I think the largest mistake is to ignore the lessons on basis of "its some other country and we are much more awesome". That's how Fukushima happened, Japanese being terribly arrogant and ignoring Chernobyl (and ignoring TMI as well) on the level of regulation. The next big accident will likewise be some country where people think their government is massively less corrupt, and ignores Fukushima.

The RBMK had the glarring error of not being safe from a reactivity point of view. That is a huge safety risk and all other safety systems are in my humble opinion irrelevant compared to this risk. For LWRs it is physically impossible for the reactor to become prompt critical, and it is by all intents and purposes impossible even for any reactivity accident to occur.

As I have said beforehand, Fukushima has quite strongly demonstrated that the nuclear industry has been regulating the wrong thing. A conclusion that I do not see repeated in regulatory space(*). Here the mindset is still that by default, the regulator has to be right, even when proven wrong.

(*)Exception: UK. This is the only country that actually derives all safety standards based on maximum allowable radioactive emissions.

shread: Soviet murder of millions was a while back, rather close to Japanese killing Koreans.

dio82 wrote:

Dmytry wrote:

To be honest, because of things like this as well as historical stuff like Minamata Disease, I've been gradually changing my view of Soviet Union vs the rest of the world. Sure, SU was corrupt and nutty, but that seems entirely on par with the west; and the personal rights during cold war do not seem to be far from where those are in any other country under comparable external threat. And the engineering, well, RBMK got it's pros and cons, the inverse shutdown is an issue outside all PRA, and the 'containment' is not of much use when you will have to vent anyway. Or the combustibility of graphite - a red herring, given the decay heat and given zirconium - uranium dioxide reaction. I think the largest mistake is to ignore the lessons on basis of "its some other country and we are much more awesome". That's how Fukushima happened, Japanese being terribly arrogant and ignoring Chernobyl (and ignoring TMI as well) on the level of regulation. The next big accident will likewise be some country where people think their government is massively less corrupt, and ignores Fukushima.

The RBMK had the glarring error of not being safe from a reactivity point of view. That is a huge safety risk and all other safety systems are in my humble opinion irrelevant compared to this risk. For LWRs it is physically impossible for the reactor to become prompt critical, and it is by all intents and purposes impossible even for any reactivity accident to occur.

Are you sure about that? SL1 did most definitely go prompt critical. The control rods have been known to fall out of BWRs during maintenance. And in a BWR, bubble collapse would increase reactivity. And as far as the worst cases go, BWR has a huge pressure vessel which, in the event of manufacturing defect, can conceivably blow up obliterating the reactor building and probably the nearby buildings as well. There's also the spent fuel pool on the top floor, with many times the CS-137 content of Chernobyl (from what i can gather, >10x), and which can in principle catch fire (exothermic reaction of zirconium with uranium dioxide, with some aluminium sheets to add to the mix). This spent fuel pool better be over 10x safer than RBMK, or the whole, expected-release wise, would be worse. We don't really have sample big enough to claim it is 10x safer, from empirical point of view, and theoretically, well, NRC has irrelevant "estimates" with utterly astronomical time between accidents; one would think they were speaking of major extinction events or meteorites hitting nearby.

Sample sizes are small but we can't really claim some superiority of BWR with any confidence. The thing that really did Chernobyl in, was the graphite tipped control rods, which were indeed a stupid mistake.

Quote:

As I have said beforehand, Fukushima has quite strongly demonstrated that the nuclear industry has been regulating the wrong thing. A conclusion that I do not see repeated in regulatory space(*). Here the mindset is still that by default, the regulator has to be right, even when proven wrong.

(*)Exception: UK. This is the only country that actually derives all safety standards based on maximum allowable radioactive emissions.

UK has rather weird CO2 cooled reactors with graphite moderators, in which we would undoubtedly find a zillion equally glaring errors and cases of neglect upon an accident. I agree though that regulation concerned itself with the wrong thing.

Unsurprising. The culture of massive corruption in Japanese government and construction is well known.

Quote:

“Even if a method works overseas, the soil in Japan is different, for example,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director at the environment ministry, who is in charge of the Fukushima cleanup. “And if we have foreigners roaming around Fukushima, they might scare the old grandmas and granddads there.”

The RBMK had the glarring error of not being safe from a reactivity point of view. That is a huge safety risk and all other safety systems are in my humble opinion irrelevant compared to this risk. For LWRs it is physically impossible for the reactor to become prompt critical, and it is by all intents and purposes impossible even for any reactivity accident to occur.

Are you sure about that? SL1 did most definitely go prompt critical. The control rods have been known to fall out of BWRs during maintenance. And in a BWR, bubble collapse would increase reactivity. And as far as the worst cases go, BWR has a huge pressure vessel which, in the event of manufacturing defect, can conceivably blow up obliterating the reactor building and probably the nearby buildings as well. There's also the spent fuel pool on the top floor, with many times the CS-137 content of Chernobyl (from what i can gather, >10x), and which can in principle catch fire (exothermic reaction of zirconium with uranium dioxide, with some aluminium sheets to add to the mix). This spent fuel pool better be over 10x safer than RBMK, or the whole, expected-release wise, would be worse. We don't really have sample big enough to claim it is 10x safer, from empirical point of view, and theoretically, well, NRC has irrelevant "estimates" with utterly astronomical time between accidents; one would think they were speaking of major extinction events or meteorites hitting nearby.

Sample sizes are small but we can't really claim some superiority of BWR with any confidence. The thing that really did Chernobyl in, was the graphite tipped control rods, which were indeed a stupid mistake.

SL1 went prompt critical because a control rod was ejected. It didn't go prompt critical as a natural response of the reactor like Chernobyl did. BWR's don't have positive void coefficients like RBMKs because the water is the moderator and not just the coolant in a BWR. The safety systems of BWRs are superior to those on RBMKs with high levels of confidence. Here's the IAEA Chernobyl Accident Report for anyone who is interested.

Unsurprising. The culture of massive corruption in Japanese government and construction is well known.

Quote:

“Even if a method works overseas, the soil in Japan is different, for example,” said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director at the environment ministry, who is in charge of the Fukushima cleanup. “And if we have foreigners roaming around Fukushima, they might scare the old grandmas and granddads there.”

Sample sizes are small but we can't really claim some superiority of BWR with any confidence. The thing that really did Chernobyl in, was the graphite tipped control rods, which were indeed a stupid mistake.

There are other criteria than statistical analysis of the frequency of meltdowns for judging the superiority of one nuclear reactor design over another. UserJoe pointed the way.

Politically and monetarily motivated hindsight bias of this kind got you where Fukushima is. Actually, its happening post Fukushima as well - everyone finds reasons why they are so much better at nuclear safety than Japan, how none of that can possibly happen except in Japan, etc. Well, something else that is equally reckless can and will eventually happen. Let me spell this out: there are moving parts in reactors and electronics which, if they stop moving or currents stop flowing, you get a level 7 accident. There are complex parts where a design mistake will result in a level 7 accident. That's equally true of most reactors. The exact chain of events of course varies between designs; sometimes the chain involves scarier words.

New nuclear power plant regulations have been proposed by a safety panel in Japan, reports the NY Times.

NY Times wrote:

The guidelines require a secondary command center away from the reactor buildings so that workers can control emergency cooling systems and vents even if they are forced to pull back from the heart of the plant during an emergency. They also call for power companies to prepare for worse tsunamis than they had previously planned for, forcing at least some oceanside plants to raise sea walls, a costly endeavor.

I understand why an auxiliary control room would be expensive and time-consuming to construct. I don't see why a taller seawall would be complicated, although NPPs wouldn't be starting up any time soon under this plan. The article says that the panel, which was constituted after Fukushima, has considerable autonomy, and the newly elected government's power over it--to forestall the new regulations--may be limited.

New nuclear power plant regulations have been proposed by a safety panel in Japan, reports the NY Times.

NY Times wrote:

The guidelines require a secondary command center away from the reactor buildings so that workers can control emergency cooling systems and vents even if they are forced to pull back from the heart of the plant during an emergency. They also call for power companies to prepare for worse tsunamis than they had previously planned for, forcing at least some oceanside plants to raise sea walls, a costly endeavor.

I understand why an auxiliary control room would be expensive and time-consuming to construct. I don't see why a taller seawall would be complicated, although NPPs wouldn't be starting up any time soon under this plan. The article says that the panel, which was constituted after Fukushima, has considerable autonomy, and the newly elected government's power over it--to forestall the new regulations--may be limited.

The problem with "higher seawalls" is that that is not all. The raw water intake structures and raw water intake pumps and distribution system would pose equally valid entry points thoughout the entire site to flood everything. All this is designed for atmospheric pressure, the water head of a 15m Tsunami would simply let all of those pipings, channels and pumps explode. So no, it is not trivial. The sea walls are mostly already built, that is easy. Tsunami-proofing the rest is really hard.

The command centre is the really expensive bit by the way. I'd wager at least half a billion per site.